Stephen Hunter - Sniper's Honor

Then she saw them, a mile off, small and seemingly inconsequential. The machines of the 2nd Panzer Corps, three divisions’ worth, Das Reich, Totenkopf, and Leibstandarte Adolf Hitler. From the distance, they were black shapes on the horizon, which rose and fell in accordance to their own tank’s course through the dips in the landform.

At a mile, the Germans opened up. It was simple strategy; any child could figure it out. The German armor was thicker, the German guns bigger and more powerful. Distance was the German ally. If it was only about shooting, the Germans—superb tank marksmen, superb battlefield maneuverers—would triumph. The tanks of the 5th Guards had to close the gap, get inside the German formation, find angles into the enemy that would let their lighter 76mm shells penetrate and kill. The cost of this adventure was paid in life. Sixty percent of the Soviet tanks would make it to the target; the other 40 percent would die in flame and high-explosive energy at the end of the 88mm trajectories. So it had to be. So it would be. The price would be paid. Who would pay it?

Around her, tanks began to light up. Some, hit squarely by the 88s, vaporized and, when the smoke abated, seemed not to have existed at all. But there were so many variations on death in that charging wave of vehicle and bravado. Hit, a 34 might be tilted askew, flames licking at it, until it suddenly blossomed, went to total fire. Or it might not burn at all, merely throwing a track and thrashing in roaring frustration as its treadless wheels ground away, spitting earth and buzzsawing itself more deeply into the ground.

So powerful was the vibration of her vehicle, Petrova could see none of this clearly. Her eyes were teared up from the dust that had settled in them, her purchase on survival was focused entirely on the strength in her hands that clung to the steel rung preventing her from slipping off and away, her head pounded in pain from all the vibrations that shuddered against it, the fumes of engine exhaust, explosive residue, and the smell of cooking meat. Images seemed to fly before her and vanish, as if she were in a cinema where the projector was mounted to the back of a crazed horse and pitched its visions on the walls and ceiling. Burning men. The shear of light from a blast. The recoil when her own tank fired. The pressure from others. The far-off blisters of illumination from the Tiger 88mm muzzles, the rain of dust, the smack and sting of debris, it was all a kind of Dostoyevskian vision of hell.

Then it went away as her tank slid into a dip in the land and, with dozens of its co-attackers, was momentarily out of the view of German gunsights. It felt like an abrupt passage to heaven as the ground beneath became smooth, almost reasonable. The tanks were grinding through a wheat field; she looked back to see the long scars each vehicle inscribed into the undulating sheaves of wheat, that staple in which her father had invested his life and even, it could be said, died to protect.

I will not let you down, Tata, she thought. I will be as brave as you. I will protect the wheat.

At that moment they crested the slope, their momentary disengagement finished, and plunged into a storm of violence. The German tanks were close. She’d seen them before, crawling tentatively through Stalingrad’s wrecked streets, but not like this, columns and columns of the things, with their remorseless angularity, their pitiless precision, the somehow Teutonic-knight definition of their profiles. The Germans were beyond panic; they were beyond anything but pure, calm, relentless battle skill. The gunners chose and worked targets as the Soviet force closed, and even when it became obvious that there were enough survivors of the charge to breach the German formation and turn the battle into a melee, the German gunners simply lowered their trajectories, tracked their targets, and continued to fire.

The two forces closed.

Now it was tank on tank, almost like a naval battle as the vessels of each side maneuvered at speed for positional leverage, angle to unarmored vitals, accuracy, and firing speed, kicking up dust, spraying debris and mud as they adjusted. It had Trafalgar or Jutland or the Armada entwined through it. The smaller Russian vehicles juked, switched attack angles radically, feinted, and jitterbugged, looking for that elusive sideways angle into the slower, bigger vehicles, which, though not as maneuverable, had more able gunners and seldom missed a shot.

She was in a cauldron of blast heat and concussion, wondering how on earth she could get a clean shot off. At that point her own vehicle came to a halt, almost spilling her, and she heard a mechanical buzz and whirr as the twenty-year-old in the turret rotated. One hundred meters ahead, seen through the squalls of smoke that dominated the battlefield, a Tiger emerged from behind the burning wreckage of another Tiger, and her boy fired. She felt the rock as the tank discharged its shell, saw it hit the flank on the squared profile and detonate, casting a galaxy of sparks pinwheeling into the air. The German was not fazed; his own turret ground another few degrees and he fired, the shock of the blast ripping up the earth beneath the muzzle, and in the next nanosecond the impact tossed Petrova, light as a feather and frail as a sparrow, into the sky. She landed with a bone-jarring, concussion-inducing thud, her mind fragmenting into slivers as stars danced and planets crashed. In a second, alone and feeling naked on a battlefield full of raging monsters, she picked up enough sense to seek shelter behind the burned-out wreck of a tank, so melted and charred that its alliance could not be discerned. She crouched, looking back to the vehicle that had ferried her to this place, and saw it listed over, smoke issuing from its hatch, until it was engulfed in flame. Nobody got out, and of its other snipers aboard, none could be seen.

She disengaged her rifle from its sling, cinched up, and found a shooting position. She looked for targets. In time, her peripheral vision oriented her toward a blur of movement, and she saw a Tiger grinding through a glade of higher vegetation. It was hit, and a massive geyser of dust engulfed it. Then the cloud cleared and she saw that the thing had taken a shell in the tread, the tread snaked free, driven by the power axle, though the tank was immobile. Its turret hatch opened and she found her position, waited for a man to emerge at the tip of the post reticule in her scope. As he came, her finger killed him. His head jerked at the shot, and his body seemed to turn to liquid as he slipped back into the vehicle. Then a smear of incandescence erupted at the juncture of turret and hull, and in seconds the thing was leaking smoke like blood, then flames, and it was gone to inferno. The dead man had blocked the others from escape.

She looked over her sight, preferring to immediately abandon that image and let her eyes adjust after the brightness of the flame, and scanned the battlefield, seeing vehicle after vehicle conflagrated, all the smoke rising, drifting skyward to form a pall over the battlefield, a low, dark sky that portended the world’s end. Noises—screams, detonations, the rip of metal tearing—filled the air, and waves of heat and grit rode blast zephyrs into her face and eyes. Ashes floated, blotting skin where they landed.

Another tank emerged from the haze, already leaking a tendril of smoke. Who knew what hell it concealed. She planted the rifle against her shoulder, steadied on the turret—not a long shot, less by far than two hundred yards—and felt her trigger stack. He came out—aflame. He rolled back across the hull, over the engine cooling grate, kicking, his arms flailing, nothing left but his agony. Her finger killed him with one shot. Another flamer crawled out and she killed him before he could roll off the turret.